Amritsar's old city inside the walls is divided into katras, walled residential and commercial quarters, each historically with its own gate that was shut at night.
The katras were founded by misl sardars and by trading communities: Katra Ahluwalia, Katra Ramgarhia, Katra Bhagian, Katra Karam Singh, Katra Dulo. The name of a katra is a piece of eighteenth-century political history embedded in a postal address.
The bazaars are named for trades because Guru Ram Das Ji invited fifty-two kinds of trader to settle the town. Papad Bazaar, Guru Bazaar for gold, Katra Jaimal Singh for cloth, Misri Bazaar. The specialisations still largely hold.
The city is entered through gates whose names survive without their structures: Hall Gate, Lohgarh, Chatiwind, Ghee Mandi, Ram Bagh.
The area around the Golden Temple was cleared and rebuilt as a plaza in the 2010s, which removed a considerable amount of old fabric and is defended and attacked with equal energy.
A gate that shuts at night is a defensive arrangement, and these were built in a century when the town was taken and retaken. Each quarter could hold on its own for a while, which is why the plan reads as a set of small forts fitted together rather than as a laid out town.
Hall Bazaar was cut through by the British after 1849 as a straight commercial street, and it is the one piece of the old city planned by somebody standing outside it. Everything else grew by accretion, and the width of a lane in there is the width whoever built last happened to leave.
The gates are mostly gone and the quarters have been rebuilt many times. The plan survives in the street pattern and in the names, which are still what an Amritsari uses to say where something is.